FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT CAETANO VELOSO - PAGE 4

B-Tribe featuring Deborah Blando Suave Suave (Lava/Atlantic) (star) (star) (star) (star) This original, invigorating and strangely dark recording has it all: a serious dance groove, a dreamy, hypnotizing sensibility and flamenco guitar flourishes that touch the heart. A collaboration of oddballs, "Suave Suave," which puts flamenco and techno in the same bag, was put together by Claus Zundel, a German, and Deborah Blando, an Italian-born singer who grew up in South America and isNM1 an immensely successful pop singer in Brazil.

Cabaret: Audrey Morris will kick off a new, weekly cabaret series 8 p.m. Monday at the Royal George Theatre. The series will feature different artists each Monday evening through Aug. 30. Phone: 312-988-9000. -- Howard Reich Art: "American Photographs: The First Century," a survey of prints from the collection of the National Museum of American Art in Washington, opens at the Terra Museum of American Art at 5:30 p.m. Friday and will continue through Sept. 26. Phone: 312-664-3939.

Los Super Seven Canto (Columbia/Legacy) The second outing from this Latin supergroup--anchored by members of Los Lobos, Tejano crooner Ruben Ramos and country singer Rick Trevino--contains a series of fine performances, but the album as a whole is marred by poor sequencing. Just as the continuity of Los Super Seven's Grammy-winning 1998 debut was disrupted by a contribution from token rocker Joe Ely, "Canto" brings in too many guests for its own good. When the core group bears down on decades-old Latin standards such as "Siboway" (a showcase for Raul Malo's ravishing Roy Orbison-like grandeur)

In the ledger books, 2002 will go down as a bleak year for the music industry. Sales were consistently down double digits from the preceding 12 months, and 2001 itself was a down period (though a last-quarter spurt of big releases offered a ray of hope). Artistically, though, 2002 was a banner year. For each album that made it to my top 10, there was another in contention for the spot. Desaparecidos, N.E.R.D., Jay-Z, Peaches, the Roots, the Clipse, Beth Orton, Cee-Lo, Billy Bragg and DJ LeSpam and the Spam All Stars all made albums that in another year (like 2001)

Beck, that sly pop music changeling, has a brand-new band. "It's just a bunch of guys I picked up on the side of the freeway, picking up trash out of the bushes," said the 32-year-old singer-songwriter. "I bought them the 'Darrin's Dance Grooves' instruction video--you know, the guy who taught 'NSync how to dance. So they all just groove behind me." Only kidding, folks. That Beck--who plays June 11 at the UIC Pavilion (1150 W. Harrison St.) is just pulling a fast one-- displaying his self-described "highly developed sense of the absurd," a predilection for goofing off that he feels is missing from contemporary pop, which he often finds to be "deadly serious."

1. Toumani Diabate and the Symmetric Orchestra: Mali's Diabate is a master of the kora, and by introducing flamenco voicings, Asian harmonics and free-jazz improvisation he updates the centuries old lexicon of the 21-string instrument. He played Chicago a few months ago with a stripped-down version of his band, but this time he's back with a full orchestra, Thursday at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, free; 312-742-1168. 2. Puerto Muerto: Christa Meyer and Tim Kelley deconstruct waltzes, cabaret, Appalachian ballads, campfire horror stories and gypsy songs into deliciously strange punk-folk on a series of albums, topped by a recent score for the 1973 cult classic "Texas Chainsaw Massacre": "Songs of Muerto County Revisited" (Fire)

That recent rash of 90-degree days made me want to cast off summer once and for all like a sweaty tube sock. "Bring on da fall," I say; cool breezes, crunchy leaves, apple cider sunsets, a pumpkin colada in my hand. Then I consider the pitfalls of that fantasy. Not only is there no such drink as a pumpkin colada, but fall always leads to winter and at least six months of shoveling, shivering and sloshing. It also means less light, frostbite, brain freeze and boogers all over my gloves.

`Orfeu" is a gorgeous movie: a modern version of the 1959 art house classic "Black Orpheus" that loses some of that earlier film's simple lyricism but brings an added contemporary bite and urgency. Like "Black Orpheus," this film is a retelling of the ancient Greek legend of Orpheus and Euridice, based on the 20th century Brazilian musical play by Vinicius de Moraes, and set in modern Rio De Janeiro's hillside shantyown and packed streets, during Carnaval. Like "Black Orpheus," which was directed by the French filmmaker Marcel Camus, it uses that carnival backdrop to drench the screen with feverish spectacle, to sweep us up into the color and excitement of the parades, sambas and Rio revels.

The pastiche aesthetic of late '90s popular music is a new take on what Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart once referred to as "the kitchen sink" -- a better name for it now is "the blender," and its swirling concoctions include a bit of post-modern everything. Hip-hop meets rock, sitars meet break beats, classical meets rap and everyone's smiling; cultural collision is celebrated in the new pop United Nations, where a fusion of rhythmic diversity creates one planet under a groove. This new blender technique also points up the fine line between creativity and kitsch, which the New York City via Japan duo Cibo Matto, whose name loosely translates from Italian as "food madness," know all too well.

This weekend, members of the Chicago band Tortoise, one of the leading lights of the avant-rock underground, are wrapping up rehearsals with Tom Ze, a 62-year-old musician who speaks only Portuguese and hails from Brazil. When Tortoise backs up Ze on his first tour of North America, including a stop Friday at the Park West, it will mark more than just the long-overdue U.S. debut of one of the world's great musical innovators. The tour also will punctuate what can only be described as a Brazilian subversion -- as opposed to invasion -- of the North American pop consciousness, which has been going on for nearly a decade.